Online report of the Progressive Review. For 53 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

July 30, 2017

What OJ Simpson, the Clintons, R Kelly, Justin Bieber and Donald Trump have in common

Sam Smith - OJ
Simpson, the Clintons, R Kelly, Justin Bieber and Donald Trump share one big
thing in common: they have a base of loyal supporters who turn a blind eye to
their misdeeds and give them the support they need to do what they want, when
they want and how they want. Further, their fame has become a major
immunization for their actions, as though morality could be judged by
ratings.

And these are just random samples of a quality that has
spread across modern America and which can be fairly included in what has been
called a culture of impunity.A decade
ago I described it this way:

In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the
powerful rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those
of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encourages
coups and cruelty, and at best practices only titular democracy. A culture of
impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter
represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such
a culture does not announce itself.

In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values,
tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff?
Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and
wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get
more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase,
anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.

A recent Foreign
Policyarticle, for example, describes the 1990s Moscow that welcomed
American businessman Donald Trump:

Women were treated abominably: The
mafia was heavily involved in prostitution, often preying on the vulnerable and
impoverished. Prostitutes regularly thronged Moscow’s main drag, Tverskaya; it
became the norm for companies to advertise for female secretaries who were “bez kompleksov,” or without
inhibitions, meaning they were ready game for whatever sexual advances their
employers would subject them to. One 2001 guide
by an American consulting firm on how to conduct business in Russia urged
foreign businesswomen to “use their femininity to their advantage.” If this
sounds like an environment where a certain U.S. president would feel right at
home, well, this was, in fact, a Russia that Trump visited and was familiar
with: The middle of the decade saw one of the more serious attempts by Trump to do business in Russia, when he tried
but failed to build a luxury condo complex in Moscow. Even Trump Jr. was aware
of the convoluted Russian business environment that was still in place a decade
later, when he visited, saying after, “It is a
question of who knows who, whose brother is paying off who.… It really is a
scary place.”

And if you think Trump’s contempt for the media is novel,
consider this from the IFEX Network
about Latin America:

Aggression and crimes against
journalists are a reality in the region, and this reality has many faces and
leaves many traces. The complexity of this issue is portrayed and discussed in
the 2012 Annual Report on Impunity: Faces
and Traces of Freedom of Expression in Latin America and the Caribbean…

“In Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala impunity and insecurity, as well as
censorship and self-censorship due to fear of direct attacks or reprisals, are
deeply rooted. Colombia is going through a serious crisis regarding access to
justice, despite State attempts to protect the victims and repair serious
damages. In Brazil, State efforts fail to reach beyond large cities to the
outlying regions, where journalists are more vulnerable to attacks and even
death.

“In Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela impunity is related to excessive censorship,
a product of restrictive regulations, apathy, and even permissive State
collusion in violations of freedom of expression. Peru sadly has one of the
largest numbers of assaults and murders of journalists in South America in the
last three decades, and law enforcement does not guarantee a reversal of that
trend. And in Argentina, impunity is characterized by repeated low intensity
violent episodes against journalists while they are covering stories.

“In the Caribbean, journalists, who are the main critics of the corruption and
lack of governance present in their countries, are physically attacked and
openly threatened by their governments, who even use the legal system against
them.

“The 16 partners of IFEX-ALC - civil society organizations that defend freedom
of information and expression in Latin America and the Caribbean - have
reported on the culture of impunity in Latin America from January 2010 to
September 2012. In this period, 74 journalists have been killed - in only eight
of these cases the persons responsible have been prosecuted. Four hundred and
thirty-one journalists have received death threats and physical attacks; these
have been perpetrated at least 878 times. In addition, 120 journalists have
been tried in court because of their publications. This scenario is even more
alarming bearing in mind that the validity of a democratic regime is
questionable if freedom of expression is at stake."

These are but two examples of the sort of culture of
impunity that America has begun to imitate, albeit in milder fashion, in the
last quarter century or so. Such a culture doesn’t begin with 74 journalists
being killed; it begins, say, with a president who treats the media as fake and
despicable, thus laying the groundwork for more drastic actions in the future.
It begins with presidents with as corrupt roots as the Clintons and Trump, who –
different as their politics may be – have had in common a constituency that
ignores any misdoing by their heroes, a trait shared by fans of show business
personalities engaged in wrongful acts.

A nice example of the difference between more traditional
cultures and those of impunity can be found in two recent events. China, a traditional
dictatorship still with an ideology, banned Justin Bieber for “bad behavior” even
as Donald Trump met with Russia’s Putin, two modern leaders sharing the
benefits of cultures of impunity and immune from "bad behavior."

Putin and Trump have far more in common with numerous
dictators of Latin America than, say, with Stalin or Hitler, for their power
comes not from allegiance to a political prescription like communism or fascism
but from what David Hackett Fischer called hegemonic liberty, namely the more
power you have the more freedom you have, a prime value of the American South
exemplified most dramatically in the contrast between slaves and their owners
and most recently by the Clintons who got away with what they wanted in
a deeply corrupt Arkansas. It is, of course, ironic when black show business personalities
exhibit such tendencies, but while in a culture of impunity, ethnicity may
limit the average freedom of a group, having power supplants ethnicity and
everything else. Which is why OJ Simpson, Justin Bieber, the Clintons, R
Kelley, and Donald Trump have so much freedom. They are icons of our new
culture of impunity.

As a 'culture', we have not totally accepted "affluenza". Republicans, Libertarians, and other wanna-be money-grubbing individuals have apparently bought into the Plutocratic environment; but the rest of us, still somehow believing in the viability of a constitutional democracy that evolved over the past century will silently go to work each day, pay taxes, vote, and all the other things that we have been doing for decades.Until its too late.

Even this article is politely censored as "deeply corrupt" leaves the reader to fill in the blank. As if who killed who is a matter of individual interpretation, or is unspeakable. But the journalistic paradigm certainly goes back to those almost named by the Church Committee. For every Penn Jones, Jr. counting the dead bodies there is an entire profession of journalists for whom accusing politicians of murder is the essence of unprofessional conduct. The obituaries no longer interest journalists as much as when Mae Brussell taught the science of political crime scene analysis. Absent such forensic inquiry there is no genuine public record.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care